There will be blood

The cold has come at last, but those thermal Carhartts kick butt. I've managed to get into the studio semi-regularly and have been preparing a large wooden panel for painting. I laid down the second coat of ground over the weekend. It's been a while since I prepped my own surface; I've been buying pre-made canvases all summer and fall. There's nothing like building it up from scratch, despite the hit to time. At 4' x 7', it was a pricey piece of wood but already the surface is divine. In a week or two it will be ready to take the first paint, a bright, uniform stain which will eventually bounce the light from deep within.

I woke in the middle of the night last week and was thinking about blood. This, of course, got me thinking about Lorca again and about all the associations tied to blood: war, sex, birth, passion, life, violence and forgiveness. I don't know if I'll continue with wood panels or go to large canvas instead. The wood is a bear to manage alone in the studio.

I am returning to red, and incorporating everything from the past few months and combining it with the approaches I was using last summer with the F&S paintings. In cleaning up (a relative term in my case) I discovered a gallon of barn paint that is still good. Because I am fortunate enough to have access, I hope to get some microscopic photographs and play with the color and images in my sketchbooks. But blood is the thematic starting point for the forthcoming paintings.

It is interesting how ideas form. I watched Pasolini's "Oedipus Rex" a week or so ago, and was devastated. Sitting with my daughters the other night, we were looking through the production book for Julie Taymor's stage version of "The Lion King" and the color palettes really overtook me. Everything I see, or hear, or read, or watch gets thrown into a whirring soup of consciousness and then is brought into focus in the studio. It's one reason I am so deliberate in choosing what media I interface with.

So the next few weeks should see some new work.